![]() The story itself, however, is hopelessly bungled in that Wallace starts with a mystery about a special kind of steel developed and people falling out over the right to produce it. Nevertheless, he is a sensualist, a self-serving criminal, a liar and a bully as well, and there were times when Wallace’s creation reminded me of Quilp, the villainous dwarf in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. to read their souls and put them into music, and he is also a master of disguise. He plays several instruments with remarkable skill and is given to “playing people”, i.e. ![]() Of course, I don’t know about the real Charles Peace, but the one Wallace builds up in his novel is certainly quite a fascinating man, though a most knavish and despicable one. Peace because, as far as I know, this is the only time he based one of his mystery stories on real events and real people. Still more ironically, Edgar Wallace must have been fascinated by Mr. Ironically, it might also apply to those who are fascinated by the antagonist in this story, a burglar and murderer by the name of Charles Peace, the eponymous “Devil Man”, who actually existed and was born in 1832 to be executed for the murder of a man called Dyson in 1879. This is one of the witty and thought-provoking observations to which Edgar Wallace treats us in his novel The Devil Man, which he wrote in 1931. “The man who finds vulgarity amusing takes two steps down.” ![]()
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